Monday, May 28, 2012

Herta Müller’s TheHunger Angel, which I read in Philip
Boehm’s translation of the original German Atemschaukel,
is a painful but frighteningly lovely account of a young man’s internment in a
Soviet labor camp after World War 2. Leo Auberg, who calls himself a
Transylvanian Saxon, tells the story of his travel to the camp, his years spent
there with coal, and his return to his family in Romania, to, among people, the
grandmother who’d said “I KNOW YOU’LL BE BACK” and the “ersatz-brother Robert,”
born while Leo was away. I think the term “ersatz-brother” gives a nice feel
for the sort of dark humor Müller brings to the book, with, of course, crucial
help from Boehm.

As a veteran of Russian camp fiction, the book took me back
to Varlam Shalamov (for Müller’s brief, stabbing vignettes) and Solzhenitsyn
(for Leo’s ability to find moments of relative happiness and his fear of
freedom “outside”). But what struck me most about the book—probably largely
because of my own interests—was Müller’s conscious use of language, both as a creative
tool for herself as a writer and as a theme for Leo. Though her hunger angels,
who hover over each prisoner, are strong, her use of language is even stronger
as she creates ways to write about horrible experiences. Here are a few
examples, plus some commentary from Boehm:

The Sound of Russian!:
Early in the book, Leo says that “The Russian commands sound like the name of
the camp commandant, Shishtvanyonov: a gnashing and sputtering collection of
ch, sh, tch, shch… After a while the commands just sounds like a constant
clearing of the throat—coughing, sneezing, nose blowing, hacking up mucus.”

As a Russian teacher who often tells her students not to
make the sound kh so gutturally that they sound as if they’re trying to cough
something up, this passage, well, struck me as a wonderful combination of
finding a way to describe a language’s sound while finding a way to express the
newness and unusualness of the sounds for Leo’s group. I even brought the book
in to read the paragraph to my first-year Russian students, who’d commented on
Russian’s harsher qualities.

A Mix of
Languages/Hunger Words: A single word can generate a lot of thought for Leo:
in “the skinandbones time,” Leo says the prisoners are given “kapusta,”
cabbage, though “cabbage soup in Russian means soup that often has no cabbage
at all,” a subversion of language. Leo then goes on to explain that “cap” in
Romanian is “head” and “pusta” is the Great Hungarian Plain. “The camp is as
Russian as the cabbage soup, but we think these things up in German,” he tells
us. Leo then goes on to say that “kapusta” isn’t a hunger word… so he lists
hunger words, words like mincemeat, hasenpfeffer, and haunch of venison, that inspire
tastes in the mouth and “feed the imagination… Each person thinks a different
word tastes best.” There’s also an episode a couple pages later where Leo is
caught, by the afore-mentioned Shishtvanyonov, carrying cabbage [sic?] soup in bottles.
Leo says he wants to bring the soup home. Though he’s not sure why he saved the
soup, Leo reinvents the soup as a medicine, saving himself from punishment.
Conclusion: the word “kapusta” can signify many things.

Homesickness &
Parasites: For me, one of the saddest uses of language involved “homesickness”
(mentioned as “heimweh”) as a euphemism for problems like lice, bedbugs, and hunger.
A few pages later, Leo notes his personal uses of words and the separation of
the words from what they signify, offering the example of the Russian “vosh’,”
which he uses for bedbugs and lice, not remembering the meaning of “vosh’”to
Russians. “Maybe the word can’t tell one from the other. But I can,” he says.

Also: The Cuckoo
Clock: I have to mention that I thought Müller did nicely bringing clocks
and the passage of time into the book, too. A chapter in the first half of the
book is called “On the phantom pain of the cuckoo clock.” In it, Leo wonders,
“Why did we need a cuckoo clock here. Not to measure the time.” Leo concludes
that the barracks clock belongs to the hunger angel, saying a certain question [which
invokes superstition] is most important, “Cuckoo, how much longer will I live.”
When Leo returns home, alive, though many of his campmates have died, “The
clock ticked away beside the wardrobe.”

To Summarize:The Hunger Angel felt especially successful
to me because Müller balances the harshness of reality—camp deaths, camp
privations, camp parasites—with a linguistic playfulness that simultaneously
reflects and rejects that same reality. Episodes of absurdity mix with harshness,
simultaneously giving the novel an air of reality and abstraction, as well as
some wonderfully dark humor.

Finally, I want to say that I think Boehm’s translation finds
a consistent voice, both fluid and linguistically marked, for Leo. Boehm quotes
Leo in his Translator’s Note, “I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself
into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using
words.” Boehm then writes of Müller, “In one novel after the other, it has been
Herta Müller’s special calling to find words for the displacement of the soul
among victims of totalitarianism.”

Up Next: I’ve had
a hard time finding something to follow The
Hunger Angel… so settled on something predictable, another Swedish murder
mystery. My next post won’t appear until mid-June, after BookExpo America.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Walkabout, a short
novel by James Vance Marshall (pseudonym for Donald Payne), is a peculiar trip
through the outback with two children from a “comfortable home in Charleston, South
Carolina” who are stranded after a plane crash. They set off on foot for
Adelaide, meeting a lone Aborigine boy as they walk. I saw Nicolas Roeg’s film version
of Walkabout in a sociology course in
college so knew the basics—the trio of kids and the outback—but was surprised (though
why!?) at how much tones differed, with the film stranding the kids through an
episode of violence rather than a plane crash.

What I remember best about the film, which I saw, oh, about thirty
years ago, is the contrast between meat for sale in an Australian city—prekilled,
pretrimmed, for sale in bulk—and do-it-yourself meat in the outback. I don’t
know if my memories are correct but that’s what stuck with me: urban life that’s
far removed from nature, food sources, and metaphorically, a knowledge of self.
Little of the “civilized” side of the food aspect of the contrast is contained in
the book beyond a stick of candy that the girl, Mary, carries in her dress
pocket. Once it’s gone, she and her brother, Peter, starve until they meet the boy
on walkabout.

Marshall emphasizes differences in culture and behavior
codes—or “sacred orders,” as we called them in my sociology course—with passages
like this one about Mary, who’s rather inhibited:

The things that she’d been told way back in Charleston were
somehow not applicable any more. The values she’d been taught to cherish became
suddenly meaningless. A little guilty, a little resentful, and more than a
little bewildered, she waited passively for what might happen next.

Beyond being embarrassed by nudity, Mary’s internal crisis
has a racial element:

It was wrong, cruelly wrong, that she and her brother should
be forced to run for help to a Negro; and a naked Negro at that.

But here’s Peter, who is younger and more able to adapt than
his sister:

Peter watched him. Inquisitive. Imitative. Soon he too
started to brush away the leaves and pluck out the blades of grass.

Marshall uses such obvious language often in Walkabout, occasionally taking an
anthropological tone to tell us, for example, “Physically, the Australian Aboriginal
is tough,” and describing walkabout in terms of tribal traditions.

The Biblical overtones in the book felt obvious, too, with the
Aborigine boy taking a Christ-like role—he even teaches Peter to fish—and
sacrificing his life. There’s also this line about a billabong, “The river that
ran out of Eden couldn’t have been more beautiful.” And that brings me to the book’s
biggest strength: descriptions of the landscape and its birds, plants, and non-human
mammals, and observing how the children learn to use and respect nature so they
can survive. Walkabout felt most successful when
Marshall stepped back and let his characters be characters. I didn’t need him to
tell me about their differing value
systems, particularly given all he’s able to show through their differences in language,
(in)abilities to find food, and comfort wearing clothing.

Up next:Herta Müller’s The Hunger Angel, which has a strong Russian theme.

Disclosures: I
read the New York Review Books edition of Walkabout,
which I bought myself. I always enjoy speaking with NYRB about translated fiction.